Community Update 1 - Setting up our Long-Term Strategy

In an effort to better streamline communicating our progress (both good and bad) with our end community, we will be publishing periodic community updates. These updates will touch on both short-term and long-term goals, how we are thinking about our strategy on all fronts, any setbacks we’re experiencing, and whatever else may be on the contribution team’s mind moving forward. For more granular, short-term action items, check out our March Spring deliverables that we published this past Sunday.

Yesterday evening we had our first post-fork strategy meeting in which we discussed the longer-term Bitcoin Private product strategy and how we should implement various forms of enhanced operational efficiency to achieve our higher level goals. These goals include, but are not limited to:

Executing on value add, differentiating product features, both for our core blockchain / official wallets and for the third party payment support systems we are planning

Setting up a world class marketing & partnerships program

Providing the best possible frameworks for support, both from the official contribution team and the open source community

Continuing to recruit some of the best engineering talent to help bolster our blockchain and application development efforts

Being one of the only cryptocurrency initiatives to place emphasis on true inclusion, with focus on gender diversity and traditionally underrepresented groups in technology / crypto

Core blockchain:

Our main focus is to ensure that network stability and performance is sustained and optimized. As we expand our development team and complete the many action items ahead, we are working toward a longer-term roadmap that will showcase unique cryptographic innovations. For example:

Introducing the ability to perform shielded transactions on an Electrum server — this is uniquely secure and improves performance.

Wallet RPC refinements — we plan to eliminate confusing shielding-related RPC calls, making it easier for users to spend in all cases.

Added support for easy spending of Segwit outputs — currently it is doable, but requires some real blockchain know-how.

Official Wallets:

Since the mainnet launch this past Friday, we’ve already made immense progress with several updates to our wallets. We’ve also communicated with the Ledger development team and have begun making the necessary enhancements for full support and integration. In other news:

We will be releasing Electrum BTCP for Android immediately thereafter.

From now on, we’ll have a ‘Stable’ and ‘Pre-Release’ version for all builds. The pre-release will contain brand new changes that are ready for testing; the stable build is assured to have all release tests passing.

We are beginning to automate testing and introduce a CI workflow. This will be added to all of our Github repos, beginning with the wallets. We plan to use Jenkins for this.

Our lead designer is working on significant improvements to the interface layout and general usability of our wallets.

We are also actively working on Trezor hardware wallet support.

Marketing, Support, & Public Relations Strategy:

One thing that has been and continues to play a meaningful role in our progress to date is our community. In such a short period of time we have built a purely organic following of tens of thousands of followers throughout the world across various social media channels. We see our community approach as three pronged:

Official marketing campaigns and messaging

Support initiative to offer users across the world the assistance they need

Formal public relations partners that help bring light to our cause at a more mainstream level

We have created things such as the Bitcoin Private Ambassador program to help create and scale deeply rooted localized communities across the world. Since implementing this program, several highly talented community managers have even found their way to helping us out on an official capacity. We will be rolling out a newly renovated version of our ambassador program throughout the month of March. Aside our official social media vehicles, this will be a key vehicle in our marketing.

Another aforementioned strategy we are putting in place is one we are extremely proud of and one that very few technology / crypto organizations think about (especially early on), is our diversity and inclusion program. We’ve on-boarded a head of adoption and inclusion that will assist us in making sure we attract and welcome individuals of all backgrounds and gender. For example, we will be partnering with various women in blockchain groups over the next several weeks and months to assist with boosting our social footprint and adoption, both from a community and internal contribution team standpoint.

Our support system contains many layers, one of which is setup right from our website. Our live chat web support is one that very few cryptos, if any at all, employ. In addition to our chat system and state of the art knowledge base that we constantly update, we are committed to providing Bitcoin Private stakeholders across the world the support they need through our Reddit, Telegram, and Facebook channels. The ambassador program will assist with scaling this out.

From a public relations standpoint, we are confident that the accomplishments we will continue to make from both a macro standpoint and with specific regard to our initiative at Bitcoin Private will attract the right media & influencer partners to chat with us about our cause. For example, just earlier today CNBC published a video infographic on Bitcoin Private, and we believe this is a testament of the worldwide, widespread interest in our mission. We are always open to getting our story out and discussing the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. Feel free to contact us at press@btcprivate.org if you’d like to get in touch.

Consumer / Enterprise third party payments strategy:

As we have mentioned in the past, one of our most important core goals is to bring Bitcoin Private to a critical mass, mainstream audience so that consumers and vendors across the world will transact in the most private manner possible. Achieving this goal goes beyond developing a strong, core foundation at the platform level.

This effort will involve developing easy to use, beautiful products / product integrations for payment gateways and vendors across the world. This effort will also involve developing a specialized support team across the world to educate and assist third party partners to understand the value in Bitcoin Private and subsequently onboard them on to our product offerings.

At our strategy meeting yesterday evening we discussed several payment gateways that are already ahead of most others with regard to accepting cryptocurrencies besides Bitcoin; examples may include but are not limited to CoinPayments, Cointopay, Stripe, and Globee among many others. We also discussed many exceptional merchant vendors that have long blazed the trail with accepting cryptocurrencies, examples may include but are not limited to Newegg and Steam. It’s important to note that working towards these types of partnerships will require time.

If you’re interested in what we are building and how Bitcoin Private can enhance your customer / payments experience, please reach out to us at partners@btcprivate.org.

Exchange partners strategy:

Although the Bitcoin Private project is less than 90 days old from the moment it was announced, we have still managed to strike important relationships with leading exchanges across the world. We are well aware that just as important our product strategy is, making Bitcoin Private as accessible as possible via exchanges is just as important.

Kucoin has credited it’s Bitcoin holders with Bitcoin Private and has a market open for trading Bitcoin Private, although Bitcoin Private deposits are not offered yet

HitBTC is working on listing Bitcoin Private as soon as possible, expected to be in March

Trade Satoshi is also working on listing Bitcoin Private as soon as possible, expected to be in March

Bittrex has added Bitcoin Private to it’s API as it prepares the Bitcoin Private wallet to credit their Zclassic holders

We are in conversations with several other exchanges at this time

If you are an exchange and want to have access to the vibrant Bitcoin Private market, please email us at partners@btcprivate.org.

Advisors:

Now that we have launched the mainnet and have our heads slightly more above the water past fork related tasks, we are looking for community experts in the technology and cryptocurrency world to garner insights and advice from pertaining to the all of these goals we are trying to achieve.

We are already working with a couple and aim to make this a priority over the next several weeks and months. If you fit this category and believe in our mission, we’d love to hear from you. Please shoot us a note at partners@btcprivate.org.

Closing thoughts:

This was quite a long update, however, we feel we owe it to our community to be as transparent as possible as we work hard to deliver on our mission of Bitcoin Private. As always, we remind our community to only trust resources and information shared from our official website, our official Github, our official Twitter account, and this Medium account.

If you would like to join our engineering team, you can apply here. If you would like to contribute on any of our marketing efforts, the best way to start is to join our ambassador program here.

We are excited to continue this community driven, open source journey to bring private transactions, both P2P and commercial, to a mainstream audience. Please leave any feedback you may have in the comments below or feel free to tweet at us!